EPIC POEM: Principles of Belonging

I started writing my epic poem this week. It’s a story that I have been thinking about for 15 years now. I’ve decided now is as good a time as any to write it, and stop thinking about writing it. I started it once, about 15 years ago, back when I didn’t write poetry. It was going to be a novel, but it was quickly abandoned. I think poetry is the better medium for this particular story anyway.

While this is quite the undertaking, with one small exception I did nothing different in preparing for the writing of it than I normally do: I wrote out my outline of intention as it relates to a dramatic poem, then started to write.

The story is that of my children’s four grandparents, how were reared, how they came together and how they drifted apart. From the standpoint of time, from the beginning of the poem to its end, it really is an epic, not just a book-length poem.

This is basically what the outline of my poem looks like. As time goes on, more detail may be filled in, but I already know the story in my head, so any reason of more detail has more to do with clarifiying the story’s purpose than the story itself.

WORKING TITLE: PRINCIPLES OF BELONGING

Stanza: Quatrains throughout
Theme: Journey of the soul
Topic: Travel
Point of View: Narrator (as opposed to character)

Sections by Character and Chronology:

1947 — Jnanabrata
1952 — Patrick
1957 — Dinah
1962 — Deborah
1977 — Deborah/Jnanabrata | Patrick/Dinah
1987 — Jnanbrata | Patrick | Deborah | Dinah

Sections by Theme:

The Gathering Principle — Quest (four sub-sections): Jnanabrata | Deborah | Dinah | Patrick
The Social Principle — Arrival (two sub-sections): Jnanabrata and Deborah | Dinah and Patrick
The Reflection Principle — Return (one section or four sub-sections): Jnanabrata | Deborah | Dinah | Patrick

QUEST:

JNANABRATA
Topic: Indian partition
Verse: Sankrit
Voice: Melodramatic

PATRICK
Topic: Travel as son of a diplomat
Verse: Blank (Iambic Pentameter)
Voice: Resigned

DINAH
Topic: Vacationing to Ocracoke Island
Verse: Anglo-Saxon
Voice: Cautious

DEBORAH
Topic: Travel to India
Verse: Welsh
Voice: Defiant

**ARRIVAL AND RETURN NOT YET BROKEN OUT**

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York, a chapbook

One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon of all time lies in the great but simple word “smock”.

www.dontknockmysmock.com/

I know how Hobbes feels – I feel the same way about the word “york”. What a great word. So good in fact, that I decided my next major project is to make a chapbook of poetry with that word as the central theme. A chapbook, for those who don’t know, is the poet’s equivalent to the novelist’s novella.

And so, I have written the following poems:

• “Wartime River”, a sympoe about two famous battles by the York River in Virginia
• “Manservant Blues”, a blues poem about York, William Clark’s “manservant”
• “Alvin Cullum York”, a poem about a first war soldier
• “Ode to Avro York”, an ode for a plane in the second war
• “First Freemsons”, a narrative. Some group had to be the first freemasons of the York Masonic Rite, right?
• “If York Minster Were My Old Cat”, the history of York Minster using a cat as metaphor
• “House of York”, blank verse narrative about Richard, the third duke of York
• “Peppermint Patty Left Behind”, a political poem about George Bush’s disastrous No Child Left Behind, with old York Peppermint Patty commercials as the poetic trope.
• “Corpus Christi”, a free-verse narrative about the York Mystery Plays (a cycle of 48 plays dating from the 14th century)
• “The Great John Hancock Journal Rant”, about the York, PA 1777 continental congress
• “Issac Reasons With Rebecca”, based off of the Ivanhoe characters
• “Acceptance”, about receiving my acceptance letter from York College of PA

I plan to write more poems with the following subjects in mind:

• York, an area inside Toronto, ON
• One of many small rural American counties called York.

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Mera Bharat, a chapbook

I went to India from Sep 1994 to Mar 1995, and then fifteen years later from March to April 2010. Quite simply, Mera Bharat (My India), is a collection of poems from those trips. Some of them have already been published.

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Interference, a chapbook

Poems that chronicle being a Melanoma survivor, and everything that entails.

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Northbound On Logic Street, a book

The manuscript is a time machine. The poems move from the Paleolithic Period to the present and into the future. The book is a journey from drunken eras of spirituality and mythology to the blossoms of logic and science and their sobered importance.

Queen Nefertiti learns her lesson. Polyphemos has a chip on his shoulder. The Siwa Oracle receives her most famous guest. An elephant and a horse help describe an ancient battle.

A Hindu god gets his head cut off. Ovid casts judgement on a deadly sin as Shaka Zulu confesses his. Charles Darwin seduces a woman before his chance meeting with a poet. An American city and an Indonesian town learn tragedy first hand.

Each poem takes on a different style or form from the others that came before it. I write formal verse and free verse (both structured and unstructured), comedy and tragedy, traditional rhyming patterns and made up ones, metered and unmetered.